How to Use StereoMonoizer to Convert Stereo Files Into Mono

Hey, folks. Matthew Weiss here. I’m going to be demoing the Stereo Monoizer, which was created by my buddy Blake Wiseman.

If you’ve been mixing for any extended period of time, then you know how annoying it is when somebody sends you a bunch of stems and multi-tracks for a record, and it’s all stereo. Even the mono files. It’s annoying, because it’s a drag on system resources, you sometimes want to process things as mono files, as what they are. It helps setting the levels correctly, all the kind of stuff. So, you go through the process of selecting all the mono files, hitting “split,” deleting one side, deleting the original stereo, and it’s annoying. Also, if you’ve done this, then sometimes you’ll know you’ll run into some things like kick drums that have slight bits of stereo information, and you have to take time to figure out whether or not it’s actually stereo or mono, or sometimes you might accidentally delete one side, which is not good.

So, this takes the idiot factor out. This takes the annoyance factor out. So while it’s not the flashiest plugin in the world, it’s a super useful utility.

Alright, so I’ve got it pulled open here. What I’m going to do is grab a recent multi-track. This Uptown Funk remix. What I’m going to do is it gives you some options for settings, like include subfolders, process selected items only, show processing log…

ADVERTISEMENT

We can take out the processing log and process selected items only. I’m going to process everything. Let’s see… Stereo mono conversion, panned depth, normalize… I’m not going to normalize the files. This can be really useful for setting up your quick in-the-box gain staging, but for this process, I don’t really need it.

For this, I’m going to output by overwriting the files. So the first step is to do the analysis.

It’s really easy. I just click analyze, and what it’s doing is going through every single stem that’s been sent here, and on the ones that are mono, it’s converting and for the ones that are stereo, it’s giving me no conversion. Then once the analysis is done, I’m going to hit process.

There we go. So, once it’s been processed, I can open up the original folder again, and if we look here, you can see that some of these have been date modified today. 11:35 AM. These are the processed tracks. So now, if I go into my Pro Tools session, and I were to import audio, I can go into my downloads, and here, these processed ones for example, let’s just pull in this bass real quick, I’ll convert and let’s say this synth funk guitar – this is an original, not a processed one. I can convert it.

You’ll see that this bass is coming in as a mono track, which is good. That’s exactly what we want. So, it saves a whole lot of time and effort.